President Trump Deletes Tweets Supporting Losing Candidate Luther Strange

WASHINGTON, DC — We're all anxious to erase embarrassing parts of our past, but when you're the president, it's nearly impossible to do. Nevertheless, President Trump tried to scrub the slate clean as Roy Moore pushes forward as the Republican nominee in the Alabama special election for the Senate, defeating the White House's preferred candidate, Luther Strange, on Tuesday night.

After the Republican primary runoff election results were in, Trump, or someone on his team, deleted three recent tweets supporting Strange instead of Moore from his Twitter timeline in the race and even predicting a surge of support for his preferred candidate.

"Luther Strange has been shooting up in the Alabama polls since my endorsement," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning in a now-deleted post. "Finish the job - vote today for 'Big Luther.'" (For more information on this and other political stories, subscribe to the White House Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

Also See: Roy Moore Wins Alabama Primary

Since every political journalist in the country and every staffer on Capitol Hill — not to mention foreign intelligence agents — laboriously monitor the president's Twitter feed, this attempted erasure was immediately detected.

The journalist watchdog group ProPublica records all of Trump's deleted tweets. Here are the three pro-Strange tweets Trump removed after the election from ProPublica:

Some have speculated that Trump's deleting of tweets may not be legal. The leaders of the House Oversight Committed wrote the White House a letter in March about the issue.

"Many of the messages sent from [President Trump's twitter] accounts are likely to be presidential records and therefore must be preserved," Reps. Elijah Cummings and Jason Chaffetz said. "It has been reported, however, that President Trump has deleted tweets, and if those tweets were not archived it could pose a violation of the Presidential Records Act."

Whether or not deleting tweets is a violation of the record-keeping laws — and given the fact that groups like ProPublica do archive the president's tweets, it seems like there is little harm — it's not clear what function it serves. Trump stood on stage and endorsed Strange in a sprawling speech on Friday, and deleting a few tweets won't make anyone forget that Moore was not his preferred candidate.

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Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images